This is an excerpt from my full-life memoir, Un Fn Myself — my real story of addiction, recovery, fatherhood, and everything in between from 1984 to 2026, including the parts most people would cut out.
The fighting between my parents kept escalating during this stretch of my childhood, especially once we were in Germany. None of us were doing well. My brother was missing the friends he’d left behind at his school. My mom had a tough job, and her health issues were getting worse. She was the commander of a unit, with all the responsibility that comes with that, and she was constantly pushing herself despite her body clearly breaking down. She kept getting migraine headaches, and the military is not an environment where anyone tells you to slow down, rest, or go figure out what’s actually wrong. It’s more like, here, take some fucking pills, get your shit together, and power through. So her health kept deteriorating, and I believe all the drugs they kept giving her to manage the pain made it worse.
As that happened, the fighting at home intensified. My mom fought more. My dad became ruthlessly critical and nasty. He was a fault finder, always pointing out where you were fucking up and how you should be doing better. I remember so many screaming fights between them that eventually something in me snapped. I remember thinking, I don’t give a shit if you get divorced or not. I don’t care. I just wanted to sit in my bedroom, play video games, and listen to music. Fuck you guys. I’m not invested in this. Meanwhile, my brother was desperately trying to save the family, trying to hold it all together. I was done. I didn’t care where I lived or who I lived with anymore. I stopped caring. That’s when I learned how to withdraw.
That withdrawal is also when I really fell into video games. Instead of making friends in junior high and high school, I played games at home nonstop. All I cared about during the day was getting through school so I could get back to my room. This is the first time I remember having that just get through the day mindset. The same feeling people describe with a miserable nine-to-five—I can’t wait until five o’clock. I started that pattern right there with school. I just wanted to get home and play Turok, GoldenEye, or Duke Nukem 64. Eventually, my brother worked my dad hard enough to convince him to buy a Nintendo 64, after my dad had sworn the Super Nintendo was the last system he was ever going to have to buy. As his dad would’ve said, wrong again boy, wrong again.
That’s where my escape mindset really solidified. Do whatever it takes to withdraw. Do whatever it takes to disappear into something else. At the same time, my father was also brilliant in certain ways. He was extremely controlling about what we listened to. We weren’t allowed to have explicit music. When The Slim Shady LP came out, I got that Eminem CD at school, copied it onto a tape on my stereo, and gave the CD back to the kid. Everybody in junior high was listening to it. You’d hear kids walking around with Walkmans, talking about it nonstop.
I remember listening to that tape alone, and honestly, it made me feel sick. Songs like “Guilty Conscience” were already bad enough on the radio, but I was desperate to hear the uncensored versions—to know what he was really saying. I remember the song “My Fault,” about the girl overdosing on mushrooms. I almost threw up listening to it. It genuinely made me feel nauseous. And yet, I kept listening.
I kept listening because I was struggling and desperate to feel something. A lot of things didn’t stimulate me enough anymore. The more I escaped into video games, the harder it became to feel anything at all. It was the same with sex and masturbation. I was compulsively releasing that pressure every day, trying to feel something, anything. Between the fighting, the isolation, the video games, and the constant sexual stimulation, I was slowly training myself to withdraw from real life instead of dealing with it.
I was putting all my heart and soul into video games. At the same time, I really wanted to date girls, but I was too scared and anxious to do it. I didn’t know how to approach them, didn’t know how to handle the rejection I imagined, and the anxiety felt overwhelming. So I was desperate for something—anything—that could make me feel. That’s where the music came in. That music actually made me feel something.
When I got to track seventeen on The Slim Shady LP, the song “As the World Turns,” something shifted. That shit had me dying laughing. At that point in my life, laughter felt rare and precious. There wasn’t a lot of it in my house, especially on the days when my parents were fighting. Everything felt heavy and serious all the time. My brother and I would already be fighting with each other over who got to play the Nintendo 64, and then I’d put on this song and just lose it. I was laughing so hard I could barely breathe. That was it. I was hooked.
From there, I dove headfirst into Eminem. Then Tupac. Then gangster rap in general. I wanted intensity. I wanted edge. I wanted something that cut through the numbness. Eventually, my dad caught me listening to it because his nosy ass decided to play my stereo while I was at school. At the time, it felt like a massive invasion of privacy, even though looking back now, it actually makes sense that a parent would want to know what their kid was listening to. He confronted me and said, “This music will fuck your mind up. It’s going to subconsciously program you to be okay with violence, with negative attitudes toward women, and all kinds of shit like that.”
Recently, I found a letter I had written to him back then. In it, I told him not to worry. I said I needed the music. I said it made me feel good and that it wasn’t going to be a problem. Looking back now, I can admit it plainly: he was dead-ass right. That’s exactly what that music does. That’s what it’s designed to do. There’s a reason you’re exposed to it in the first place.
We barely made it through Germany without my parents getting divorced. Things got ugly. My dad almost left—he had plane tickets. By the end of it, there was just resentment. Honestly, my parents probably should have gotten divorced, but instead they stayed together, resentful, giving each other as much space as possible and calling it functional. In 2000, we finally moved back to the United States, and it felt like mercy. I was so sick of living in Germany. When we first arrived, it was exciting—new country, new culture, everything felt different and interesting. But after three years, I was done. I missed the U.S. badly.
We didn’t have TV over there, and I felt completely disconnected from what was happening back home. I felt far away from everything familiar. Coming back felt like relief. But then I got the internet. And once I had the internet, and once I was dropped into yet another new school, things shifted again. Instead of focusing on school or really making friends, I went even deeper into games—this time online. Suddenly, I could play with other people. That was huge for me.
Before that, all I really had was my little brother. I was desperate to play with other people because I had completely outpaced him. I was two and a half years older, played more games, and I crushed him at almost everything. In GoldenEye, I would just destroy him. I wasn’t nice about it either. I didn’t let him win. I beat his ass as hard as I could every single time. Most of the time, we had to play cooperative games because competitive games were pointless—I’d wipe the floor with him.
Every once in a while, maybe one game out of ten, I’d subconsciously ease up just enough so he wouldn’t completely give up. Not enough to let him win, but enough to keep him from quitting altogether. Eventually, I wouldn’t let him win ever if I could help it. He got tired of playing with me. And that was another quiet loss I didn’t really know how to process at the time.
Once we got the internet, something shifted hard. I remember thinking, shit, I don’t need him anymore. I didn’t need my brother to play with me. I didn’t need anyone, really. I could go online and play as many video games as I wanted, whenever I wanted. I threw myself into it completely. I started playing Star Wars: Force Commander, and I soon became one of the top players in the world. There weren’t millions of players or anything like that. Maybe a few thousand total, with a few hundred actively ranked on the ladder. I was number one for over a month straight, uninterrupted and was the highest ever in total wins last time I checked. I was nearly unbeatable and it felt incredible.
For the first time in my life, I noticed a sharp contrast. In most areas of my real life, I felt like a weak little bitch—awkward, anxious, unsure of myself. But in video games, I felt like a god. I had total control. I was dominant. I was respected. That feeling was intoxicating, and once I tasted it, I wanted more. So I branched out into other games like Quake 3 and Counter-Strike. One time, we actually played Quake II at school on the local area network and crashed the entire school network. That was one of the best experiences I had in junior high—sitting there with my classmates, all of us connected, blasting each other in this shared digital space. Meanwhile, at home, my brother started branching out into real life. He made new friends. He got into skateboarding. He was hanging out in the neighborhood. And I was going in the opposite direction. I was mostly just playing as many video games as I possibly could.
By the summer of 2001, right before my senior year of high school, a game called World War II Online came out. That game was more than a decade ahead of its time. It was a massively multiplayer online game where infantry, tanks, airplanes, anti-tank guns, trucks, buildings, trees, hills—entire terrain systems—were all operating together on a scale model of France, in the same battles, on the same servers. It was insane. It was also incredibly glitchy. You’d get killed by a tank you couldn’t even see because, on their end, they had loaded, but on your end, they hadn’t. The system was sloppy and unstable.
None of that mattered. The moment I started playing it, I knew I was in trouble. I remember thinking, holy shit, this is the most fun thing I’ve ever done in my life. I played as much as I possibly could. I played even when it was clearly ruining parts of my life. At the time, I couldn’t see how it was all connected. I just knew I had found a place where I felt powerful, competent, and alive—and I wasn’t willing to let that go.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.